LandPrint

Soil is a living archive of how societies govern, value, and manage their land. Yet more than 60% of Europe’s soils remain in unhealthy condition. Solutions exist, but they often fail to take root because the deeper human imprint (i.e., economic short-termism, fragmented governance, and cultural detachment from soil) remains unaddressed. Current soil policies and assessments focus mainly on one-way causality, describing how human activities degrade soils, while underestimating the feedback loops through which degraded soils in turn reshape behaviours, governance, and economic systems. This leads to policies that undervalue the true costs of degradation and overlook soil health as a driver of transformative change. LandPrint responds by conceptualising soil as part of a layered socio-ecological system: socio-cultural practices (subsoil), political-regulatory frameworks (topsoil), and economic and behavioural incentives (surface), all interacting with biophysical indicators.

Through these, LandPrint integrates evidence, models, and participatory methods to reveal the two-way feedbacks between land degradation and human systems. The project is structured around four interconnected roots: Explore (harmonised indicator & data matrix across disciplines), Explain (mapping behavioural, institutional, and economic drivers), Experiment (nested modelling with agroeconomic tools, ABM, and FABLE pathways), and Enable (Policy Toolbox, EU Soil Policy Lab, peer learning cycles, and cultural foresight workshops). Five case studies across diverse pedoclimatic and socio-economic contexts provide the evidence base, feeding data into EU infrastructures such as SoilWise and EUSO.LandPrint directly supports the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” by delivering 3 advances: (i) evidence on the true costs and multi-layered drivers of degradation, (ii) policy tools for readiness, feasibility, and equity, and (iii) pathways to embed soil health in climate resilience and territorial cohesion.